Search

On a cold day last fall, Iowa State University scientist Michelle Soupir and her team of graduate students shoveled out the woodchip-and-mud entrails of nine concrete-lined water-quality cells at the Agricultural Engineering and Agronomy Research Farm near Ames. They packed samples from the cells — mini-bioreactors — into plastic bags and labeled them to take back to the lab, where they would measure bacterial activity and the rate of woodchip decomposition.